Snail Mail

I thought about writing a postcard this summer. But it seemed wrong to send one from my home.

Postcards carry greetings to home from faraway lands. Covered margin to margin in the writer’s hurried hand, they convey tales of the unfamiliar to the very familiar—parents, siblings, friends, that guy you’re kind of seeing.

To me, the District of Columbia is filled with the familiar. Or at least it used to be. Spending this summer there, I wondered if it might now be filled only with memories.

When I first came home over Thanksgiving break, I felt lost, in limbo between my new life behind Johnston Gate and my old one inside the Beltway.  I went to sit on my living room couch, a piece of furniture on which I’d spent enough nights poring over 19th-century floor speeches (for history) and vectors in n-space (for math) to have created what I thought was an indelible, Molly-shaped dent in the cushion. But the imprint had faded, at least as far as I could make out underneath the papers my little brother had strewn across my former home-within-a-home.

“Yeah, I sit there now,” announced the 15-year-old intruder smugly.

“This is my couch,” I replied, my tone marked with far too much emotion to befit the situation.

“Molly,” my father said in the voice he reserves to explain things to the very young or very stupid. “He lives here.”

Naturally, I burst into tears.

It was only a few days later that I accidentally referred to returning to campus as “going home”… and cried again. My Freudian slip and subsequent mini-meltdown forced me to do something I should probably do more often: think. This summer, the phenomenon repeated itself.

I was living in my house, sleeping in my bed, and, yes, sitting on my couch. But in the morning, instead of donning jeans and a t-shirt and driving off to school, I put on my grown-up clothes and blended in seamlessly—or so I liked to think—with the weary commuters who travel down the Red Line weekday after weekday. And in the evening, instead of staying up late ostensibly completing last-minute homework, but mostly watching Seinfeld, I shared tales from the office with my parents before collapsing (sometimes still in those aforementioned grown-up clothes) in a tired heap and drifting off to sleep.

I was living in my house, but was I really living at home?

It took 11 hours, 650 miles, and one snail making its slow, sticky way up a rocky beach in Belfast, Maine—my final summer destination—to convince me of the answer: yes.

A snail takes its home with it. Shell planted firmly on its (lack of) shoulders, the creature I spotted was at home when it crawled out of the ocean. It was at home when I saw it dragging itself over the high tide line. It would remain at home whether it turned back toward the sea or found a cool, comfortable tide pool to rest in on the shore. And no matter if that home gets roughed up along the way—bruised by a barnacle, slimed by the seaweed, stained by the sun—it will still be home.

So really, I was home this summer, I was at home in Maine, and now I’m at home once again on the banks of the Charles (or, more realistically, a little ways up Garden Street). Each home is a little different because, each time I relocate, I am a little different. Home moves when I do, accreting with every place I go, every job I work, and every person I meet.

The same is true of every Harvard student, though it might not always feel that way—especially not at first. Within Harvard, undergraduates find themselves caught in a culture of transience. We move quickly and constantly, from class to class in the mornings, from dining hall to dining hall in the afternoons and evenings, from final club to final club at night (if you’re into that sort of thing).

But in each new spot, we pick up something lasting. We realize the wonders of Gilbert’s electrifying psychology lectures, the horrors of HUDS red-spiced chicken, and the somewhere-in-between of a Thursday throw-down at the Delphic. These small things become part of our own shells. And one fine morning, we wake up knowing what’s been true all along: We’re at home, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, till even after graduation do us part.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m ever going to give up my couch.

Molly L. Roberts ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Cabot House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays. Follow her on Twitter at @mollylroberts.